• Searching “social media addiction” on Web of science turns up lots of documents.

• This section lists the journal where the article was published. You should look for peer-reviewed sources.
• Journal impact factor is an (imperfect) method of measuring the prestige of an academic journal using a weighted measure of citations.

• The abstract section will briefly summarize the article and the most important findings.

• There are some additional keywords here that might be helpful guides.
• For this project, you should keep an eye out for terms like “questionnaire development”, “validation” etc.

• Web of science also links papers together using their citation networks, so this is a useful thread to pull if you want to find more literature on the same topic.

• Since I’m using the UMD proxy, a Find@UMD link shows up that will take me to a page where I can find the full text of the article.
• In this case, the full text is freely available from the publisher.

• Academic articles tend to have a relatively consistent structure. You don’t need to read the whole thing to get useful information.

• For our purposes here, the “methods” and “literature review” sections are probably the most important components.

source

• In the “methods” for this paper, there’s a heading called “measures” where the authors describe how they went about measure the key variables for their model.

• The critical component is the citation for the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale.

• The critical component is the citation for the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale.

• This is the original citation for the scale they’re using, so you would want to track down this article for yourself.

• If the questions are available, you’ll often find them listed in the appendix at the end, or in the supplementary materials, or with a link to a webpage.

• If the questions are available, you’ll often find them listed in the appendix at the end, or in the supplementary materials, or with a link to a webpage.

• In this article, the questions used are listed in the appendix.

• Is the scale widely used? The citation count for the original publication can be a good indicator.

• Have there been additional validation studies?

• Widely used scales might have been subjected to multiple validation studies to examine how well they work and what they measure

• A meta-analysis is a study that systematically reviews and aggregates the results of previous studies.

• Dimensionality refers to the estimated number of latent constructs measured by the instrument (this is typically measured with some form of factor analysis)
• Unidimensionality indicates that there’s evidence that a single trait explains most of the variation in responses to the scale items.

• Evidence of construct validity comes from examining how well this measure correlates with other things that should be associated with social media addiction.

• (The abstract says these are “pooled” because they’re based on a weighted average of multiple studies.)

• Test-retest reliability is an indication of how closely responses correlate between follow-ups.

• (There weren’t enough papers to quantitatively evaluate this)

• Social media addiction is not a recognized psychiatric disorder, so this isn’t a clinical diagnostic tool, but it appears good enough to use to draw conclusions about problematic social media use in the population.